Carl Wilson, CIO, Marriott International
Photo By Christopher Hartlove

Virtualization's Big Role

Virtualization is helping to drive those trends because it affords a cost-effective way to create an in-house test environment, Morency says. Virtualization also aids with the actual movement of workloads from one set of hardware to another set of hardware.

Dan Blanchard, VP of enterprise operations at Marriott, says the company's strategy has been to use virtual servers wherever possible, which, in turn, makes the recovery process quicker, easier and more reliable in that part of the IT environment. Because workloads are often shifted, moving them to a disaster recovery environment is just one more step, he says.

Another key advantage: potential errors or problems have likely been spotted and eliminated through ongoing testing, Blanchard says. Applications running on virtual servers aren't validated only on a quarterly basis as part of the disaster recovery test process; they're tested as part of normal operations, Blanchard says.

But Marriott hasn't been able to shift all of its applications to its VMware technology. Some vendors have refused to support their software if it runs in a virtual environment, and others haven't figured out how to charge for licenses, Blanchard says. So, like many companies, Marriott must maintain more traditional processes and procedures for the recovery of some of its business systems.

If Marriott's use of virtualization technology isn't especially unique, its selection of a physically inaccessible bunker for disaster recovery is, says Laura DuBois, an analyst at IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher.) That decision would be more common for a financial services firm or a company based in Europe, where the level of security tends to be heightened over threats of terrorism and bombs, DuBois says.

Economic and Environmental Gains

Marriott, however, reasoned that the decision would make sense from both an economic and an environmental standpoint. The company calculated that the 10-year cost of colocating a new data center at Iron Mountain's underground facility would be cost neutral compared to its existing agreement for disaster recovery, according to a spokesperson. Plus, the opportunity to improve energy efficiency would bring significant savings and help the company to achieve its environmental goals.

Blanchard says the key differentiator that pushed the Iron Mountain facility ahead of two other finalists was the environmental benefit. The top criteria to select the site had been mileage (because the company wanted IT staffers to be able to reach the facility without need of an airplane), security and the corporate philosophy to "conserve and preserve," he says.